Think about “normal” for a second. It’s a statistical concept. It doesn’t say anything about any individual. It’s about the behavior of all people in the sample, on whatever attributes are being measured, divided by the number of people in the sample.
Statistics can be misleading in so many ways. Are the attributes measured important? Do they help us understand anything about humans that we care about? Do they actually measure what they are supposed to be measuring?
What about the sample of people measured in this survey? Are they truly representative of the population? Which population does the sample represent?
Finally, we should remember that looking only at the average can be misleading if that is all we look at. The amount and strength of variation are also important. What does it mean to look at an average when the variation of the population is enormous?
So that’s statistics. Humans don’t count things in daily life. Our brains make observations and estimate averages and variation without taking scientifically accurate observations. But our observations in daily life can also be thrown off by the same things that are thrown off by carefully measured statistics.
We may be making our judgments about normality based on a group of people who are actually unlike the population as a whole. We may be paying attention to an incomplete set of traits in other people—or even the wrong traits. We may also be paying too much attention to our perception of the average and not appreciating the amount of variation. Also, there may be hidden behavior that we are not aware of, because people don’t want others to know they aren’t as “normal” as others are.
Crazy, as we seem to use it, means far from normal. In statistical terms, that means beyond 3 standard deviations from the average. It’s a very small percent of people—maybe less than one percent.
Humans exhibit so many kinds of behaviors that could be measured. If you look at all of them, then surely every individual must behave in a way that is far from normal, on at least one measure. So everyone could be considered “crazy” on at least one trait.
So crazy people are crazy in one or more ways, and normal people have no ways in which they stand out. Which means pretty much everyone is “crazy.” Being crazy, then, is normal. The thing is that we mostly pay attention to our differences. It’s easier to compare ourselves on things where we are quite different, than it is on traits where we are pretty close. Thus, perceptually, we are more likely to think we are quite different from others, since we focus mainly on differences.
Mostly we know ourselves the best. This means we are more likely to see ourselves as abnormal that we are to see others as abnormal. We may struggle to be normal, but in the end, it’s very hard to succeed. You probably have to ignore a lot of things in order to think of yourself as normal. I’d venture to say that it’s a person who abnormally able to ignore many things who would consider themselves normal.
Of course, having said all that, I am truly crazy. I have the certificate to prove it!
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